Many applications couple a motor to a shaft, which may take the form of a drive screw to transfer the rotary motion of the motor to another device, such as a carriage of a linear actuator that is driven by the screw.
Existing motor and screw combinations offer a variety of assembly and stocking problems. With reference to FIG. 12, a conventional linear actuator 1000 takes a screw 1010 and a standard journal and attaches them with a coupler 1002. For instance, an output shaft of the motor (not shown) will be co-axially aligned with the rotational axis of the screw 1010. The coupler 1002 will be attached to the adjacent ends of the output shaft and the screw.
Unfortunately, with this method, a motor mount 1004 is interposed between the end block 1016 of the actuator and the motor to space the motor away from the end block 1016 of the actuator to accommodate the coupler 1002. This causes undesirable excess length to the overall system.
Alternative coupling methods have been proposed to attempt to shorten the overall length of the system. For instance, in one application, the shaft of the screw is directly welded to the motor. This does shorten the overall length of the system but makes the motor/shaft combination custom for each system based on the length, causing stocking and replacement part difficulties.
It is therefore desirable to provide a system that uses a coupler arrangement but at an overall shorter length for the complete system.